In silver halide photographic light-sensitive materials undergoing direct viewing, such as color printing paper, it is a common practice to use a yellow coupler, a magenta coupler and a cyan coupler in combination as dye-forming couplers. These couplers are required to offer the desired level of basic performance, including the color reproducibility, color developability and image storage stability in the dye image obtained. In recent years, there has been increasing demand from users for improved dye image storage stability and improved color reproducibility leading to exact reproduction of the original color of the subject.
For improving image storage stability, the use of a phenol or piperidine derivative with a particular structure is proposed in Japanese Patent Examined Publication Nos. 1420/1976 and 6623/1977 and Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication) Nos. 87456/1984 and 96944/1991. However, these methods often result in reduction in coloring density.
Also, since the absorption characteristic of the obtained dye image is very important in color reproduction; couplers with good absorption characteristic have recently been studied actively. For example, the pivaloylacetanilide yellow couplers described in Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication No. 123047/1988, 9051/1992 and Japanese Patent Application No. 245949/1990, which have an alkoxy group in the anilide moiety thereof, were found useful for color printing paper because they form a dye with sharp absorption. However, various investigations of these yellow couplers revealed a drawback of insufficient stability to light, i.e., light fastness, of the dye image formed.
Also, in color photographic light-sensitive materials and light-sensitive materials for printing, there recently has been increasing demand for high sensitivity and stable processing with the trend toward time reduction in the printing and developing processes. Particularly the photographic performance change with change in processing solution component concentration in continuous processing has posed an increasingly difficult problem in rapid processing.